38 comments:

Meat eaters are people, so it stands to reason they have all the vices people are prone to have. Things seem to be about the same in India as they are here, they just blame different groups of people. Meat eaters in India must be equivalent to conservatives here. It's good to have someone to blame.

Went to school with a cat who carried Kale in a plastic bag. It was the only food he ate. Claimed he never needed to drink water. His skin was the color of that fake Coppertone tan from the 60's. Once I conned him into eating an order of MacDonald's french fries. His joints swelled like mini-baloons.

When our distant ancestors started eating meat, they developed larger brains. The human brain burns more energy than any other part of the body, and you can't run that brain on a diet of sprouts and tofu.

"The strongest argument that meat is not essential food is the fact that the Creator of this Universe did not include meat in the original diet for Adam and Eve. He gave them fruits, nuts and vegetables," reads a chapter entitled Do We Need Flesh Food?

Adam and Eve? I don't think that they appear any of the Hindu scriptures!

Clyde - or maybe because they started having bigger brains then they ate meat to supply their caloric needs. I just don't buy the idea that infusion of meat = stimulate brain growth on a genetic level.

Adam and Eve? Hah. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans are all omnivores.

Human Evolution in Summary:

1) One subgroup of proto-chimpanzees picks up a habit of throwing things more often than other proto-chimpanzees. The immediate advantages are an improved ability to drive off attackers safely and hunt game effectively.

2) Within this throwing-oriented subgroup of proto-chimpanzees, mutations that help it carry and throw weapons are favored, making it better at the ability to drive off attackers and hunt game. These include increased bipedality (freeing up the carrying/throwing hands). As a side effect, the group becomes less well-suited to spending time in trees.

3) This split-off proto-human group spends more time on the savannah instead of the forest. Adaptations that help these bipedal proto-humans endurance run make them even more effective hunters, as they can chase gazelles and the like into exhaustion. Adaptations selected here include less body hair, better sweat glands, longer leg bone lengths, less hand-like foot shape, enlarged rounded (energy-conserving springy) buttocks, and the enlarged/springy Achilles tendon. (Long hair on the head may also date to this, serving as a loose, keep-the-sun-off covering role that Bedouin robes also serve.)

4) Improved hunting (from throwing and from endurance running) increases the calories available to the proto-humans. Proto-humans with mutations that cause them to have larger brains, instead of starving to death, survive - and use the extra brain to out-think rivals in the tribe for status (which translates into food and mating opportunities). As a result, brains generally increase in size due to the utility in inter-tribal politics, ultimately to a head-size limit dictated by the size of the pelvic opening.

5) While the brain increases in size, tribal politics become more sophisticated. Proto-humans better at communicating ideas and emotions have an advantage over the ones that don't; the human voicebox accordingly becomes more sophisticated.

6) The large brain and the communicating voicebox give humans the ability to develop sophisticated ideas about the world and transmit them. Mutations for extended lifespan and menopause are selected because they effectively equip tribes with the first "libraries" (old-people brains) of data about how to cope with difficult and unusual situations.

A) Unknown timeframe during the brain enlargement period. The bigger brains of humans allow them to figure out that having sex during estrus results in pregnancy. This results in the first birth control era, as these obvious signs are used as a signal for abstinence to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Women who by accidental mutation do not display obvious estrus wind up having more children than the ones who do, and eventually natural family planning self-selects obvious estrus out of humanity. Natural family planning will not return for thousands of years, until after sophisticated medical study manages to find the remaining signs of human estrus.

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Which is to say, we're human because we're the chimpanzees that adapted to be better at killing other animals.

Granted, it's pretty hard to conclusively prove any of the above from the mere bone record, but it puts all of humanity's major divergences from the chimps and bonobos into a single logical progression (consistent with the fossil evidence) where a single initial divergence (a tribe of proto-chimps that threw stuff more often than other proto-chimps) logically leads the chain of changes that explain most of the major physiological differences humanity evolved.

(The unusually large size of female breasts and male penises in humans compared to other apes are the major physiological items not explained.)